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Study Finds 3 Laws Could Reduce Firearm Deaths By 90% (meta.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The study, published in The Lancet, used a cross-sectional, state-level dataset relating to a host of topics associated with firearm mortality including gun ownership and even unemployment from across the U.S. to examine the relationship between recorded gun deaths and gun-control legislation. The study found that some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly. According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000. If the federal government implemented all three laws, the scholars predict that the overall national rate of firearm deaths would drop by over 90% to 0.16 per 100,000.
'Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, told the Washington Post, “Briefly, this is not a credible study and no cause and effect inferences should be made from it.” Webster is later quoted, stating, “What I find both puzzling and troubling is this very flawed piece of research is published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals around Something went awry here, and it harms public trust.”'
Who was it that said we don't need gun control, we need bullet-control. If a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no innocent bystanders. Was it Chris Rock?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless of your position on this, if the Second Amendment can be restricted so can all the others. They are necessary controls on government power (sans Prohibition), be careful what you wish for.
"...stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly."
Really, no shit. Allowing people to defend themselves with guns leads to gun-related deaths. Shooting people dead that are invading your house trying to harm you is a bad thing? I suppose they want the homeowners/renters dead instead. Way to cherry pick facts. I have no problem with stand-your-ground as long as it is a justified shooting. Conversely those that not justified stand-your-ground should be an immediate firing squad (see what I did there).
Bullshit facts such as the above are not going to help those who are trying to convince people that all-guns-are-bad.
"By the way, I hear giving people driving licenses leads to an increase in vehicular deaths. We should ban it immediately." I await the all-guns-are-bad people picking apart that statement (while completely missing the point).
Heck, the Three Laws could reduce firearms deaths by 100%! (I'm assuming that the First Law states "no firearm shall harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.")
Of 25 firearm laws, nine were associated with reduced firearm mortality, nine were associated with increased firearm mortality, and seven had an inconclusive association....Very few of the existing state-specific firearm laws are associated with reduced firearm mortality
Not enough information in the Lancet summary to draw any conclusions, but expecting a drop of 90% doesn't sound realistic.
This "make background checks mandatory for private sales" thing sounds good, but won't work. It won't work for the same reason that no one pays sales tax at a garage sale: you're supposed to do so, but there's no way for the government to enforce the sales tax laws on people who don't hold a business license.
The existing background check system works because it's tied to firearm dealers' licenses: they've got to do it to keep their business license.
Ironically, during the Clinton administration the feds went on a "too many people have FFLs, let's make them much more expensive and hard to get!" spree. Which now means that many fewer people participate in the background check system, as a result of another initiative that sounded good to people who have a tenuous connection to reality.
For what it's worth, if you do go buy a firearm on the internet, odds are really good that you're getting a background check anyway. Why? Because to ship a firearm, it's got to go from FFL to FFL. And the FFL in your town handling your shipment is required to do a background check.
But, it sure does sounds good to propose such a law: to people who have no clue how things actually work. Which, it turns out, is true of most of the "feel good!" solutions non-gun owners concoct to impose on gun owners. Comes of trying to legislate to match what they see in movies and in cop shows rather than what actually happens in reality. So, I wonder how this study came up with their numbers. Did they just say "hmm, X% of people buying their guns person to person commit a crime, a BG check would magically change that number to 0%"? I suppose it might, if 100% of the people followed the new, easily ignorable law. Considering that they're going and ignoring other, stricter laws to commit their crimes (like, "killing people is illegal"), that sounds rather optimistic.
Even if they are 3 laws safe it seems dicey to arm them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly
I'm pretty sure that part is a designed feature, where a homeowner can kill a rapist or a burglar.
Of course, that even presumes that reducing gun deaths should be a direct policy goal of federal policy at all, something many people disagree with.
That may sound weird but you are spot on. How the hell can these researchers simply lump together all "gun related deaths"? A guy who gets shot while committing a robbery, a woman shooting a guy attempting to rape her, a child finding his dad's gun and shooting his brother by accident, some idiot cleaning a loaded weapon and killing his neighbour, a guy committing suicide by firearm, a cop shooting a fleeing suspect, a wife mistaking her husband for a burglar and shooting him... All of these cases are different and should be counted differently. If a guy gets shot while committing a serious crime, that may not be the sentence that the law prescribes but I call it justice. Screw them, that's the risk of committing violent crimes. That's not a point against gun ownership, but for it, if it means that a violent crime has been prevented. The other examples are points against gun ownership, or at least against letting idiots have guns. But talking about "gun related deaths" is pointless if you fail to distinguish the circumstances under which these events took place.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As a very clear example why this (and most) anti-gun "studies" are silly, one large category is suicides. They measured suicides that used guns before a ban/law to how many suicides used guns afterwards. They found that people who kill themselves are less likely to use a gun if guns are less available. What they didn't find was a drastic change in the number of suicides. Still the same number of people dead. They pretend that if someone dies jumping off a bridge, that's fine, suicide is only bad if they use a gun.
This same fundamental error (trick?) is used in most anti-gun studies, they say "gun deaths" and "gun crime". Comparing murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime for the ten years before the UK gun ban vs the ten years after, we find that murder, rape, robbery, and total violent crime all doubled immediately after the ban. The kooks publish studies saying it's great that there were fewer "gun murders". According to their reasoning, it's better to have two people stabbed to death than one person shot.
I noted above that most gun control laws completely fail to reduce crime, to reduce murders, etc, and they tend to INCREASE rape and sexual assault. There are a couple of things that work, though, in the right combination.
Texas had success with combining a mandatory sentence for make use of a deadly weapon in commission of a crime along with heavy promotion/ advertising of it. On city busses, billboards, etc you'd see ads like this:
Robbery: Two to five years in prison
Using a weapon in a robbery: Ten more years
After the ads were run, fewer robbers used weapons, resulting in fewer deaths. Interviews with convicts confirm that word got around the "thug" community: don't bring a gun if you're thinking of committing a crime.
Similar promotion of the concealed handgun law was also effective. Ads targeting high-crime communities reminded potential bad guys that the good guys now have guns, and may shoot back.
Talk to some gun owners sometime. You'll find many of them rather uneasy about the idea of selling to someone without a BG check. Thing is, there's nothing you can do other than to sell the gun to a dealer and have them resell it, which of course eats up money you might get. People do what they can to CYA, you can find forms online they'll print and have the other person fill out (none of which they are required to do). Some will just decide to do it through a shop anyways.
I'm one of those people. I'm not super in to firearms, but I like them, own 3 of them, and have a reasonably good working knowledge about them. Some time ago I decided to sell off one of my pistols. I had gotten a second one that I liked much better and didn't want the old one. It was a Glock 17, they sell pretty easy. However I was just uncomfortable selling it with no way of checking on the buyer, so I decided to eat the cost and sold it to a dealer. They offered me about half of what I'd get from an individual, no surprise since they were going to sell it for about what I would get (standard retail markup is about 100%).
I'd love the ability to have a good private BG check system, and you can be damn sure I'd use it.
How much would such a thing help? I'm not sure but I have trouble believing it would hurt.
What do you want to achieve exactly? You want to reduce mass murders? The are spectacular, however they are marginal in the stats. You want to reduce the homicids? Target criminal groups, they are not very likely to respect any legislation about firearms in first place. And to simplify, two thirds of the deaths are suicide and the other is homicids. Accidents and mass murders are marginals.
Achille Talon
Hop!
The CDC isn't allowed to research gun violence because they produced a "scientific" paper that was nothing but a political wish list to ban guns. It was so completely debunked that the fallout was them losing the right to do that research in the future. Basically, they lied so blatantly that they can't be trusted.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Maybe you'd like to click some of these links - https://www.google.com/search?...
Authors of trash fiction and Hollywood have instilled the belief that homicide rates were extremely high in the "wild, wild west". Facts are, there have been hundreds of gunfights in Hollywood, for every real-life gunfight in the American west.
In modern day Hollywood, there have been billions of deaths in space by violence. In reality, how many humans have died in space? And, none by violence.
http://libertarianstandard.com...
In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.
In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.
Zooming forward over a century to 2007, a quick look at Uniform Crime Report statistics shows us the following regarding the aforementioned gun control “paradise” cities of the east:
DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
only 5 of which were killed by a gun.
nearly every spree killing before 1996 was a shooting.
only one after involved a gun. the rest were arson, or knives.
and each individual incident before 1996 had more fatalities than the incidents that followed 1996
seems like an improvement to me.
nice try.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I'm decidedly pro-gun, but I think we have to be careful with that line of argument. What happens if you cherry-pick the most violent regions of those other countries and shut them down? I don't actually know, but I suspect that the bulk of their violence (including gun violence) also happens in a few bad areas and that their statistics would drop, putting the US back toward the top of the list.
It should also be noted, though, that statistics measuring rates of firearms homicides are inherently biased from the outset. What we should be measuring is rates of homicides (and attempted homicides) with any weapon. Draconian gun control laws do actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of the populace, and therefore do reduce gun deaths... but that really doesn't matter at all to everyone who gets stabbed or beaten to death instead of shot. Now, there's an argument that the presence of guns increases the total homicide rate, and that's an argument worthy of discussion. (However, I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's correct, and if you plot the nations of the world on a graph of gun ownership rates against homicide rates, you'll find no correlation.)
And incidentally the population of australia almost doubled in the same time frame
so the numbers should be re normalized as % of death by massacre to really compare.